Knowing your customer is key to building great products.

Great products do one thing – solve a customer problem better than all the other alternatives.

To do so, you need to know your customer. Specifically, you need to:

• Understand your customer’s goals & desires
• Uncover their hidden needs
• Create a viable solution that the customer can use, and
• Deliver more value than anyone else

Which then begs the question….

How do you get to know your customer?   

There are two ways – direct and indirect.

The direct approach, as the name implies, requires product teams to directly involve customers in the design process.  

The indirect approach relies on more traditional market research practices.  Where customer data is gathered, synthesized, and analyzed by a third party.   

To understand the differences between the two and its impact on product success, check out the infographic.

You can view the infographic here.

The direct approach delivers a superior outcome.  

You would think that the indirect method would be better and more efficient.  After all, it is conducted at scale and is easier to consume.  It is all laid out for you.    

But, unfortunately, it ends up providing you with the wrong signals. 

Let’s take a look at why that is and how direct approaches are so much better.  

1. Direct relies on first hand data to make product decisions

The problem with the indirect approaches is that the data is second hand.

You don’t know how the data was collected, if it can be trusted, how it was interpreted, what was left out, when it was collected (vs. published) etc.

Direct research practices rely on first hand data. Where data is collected by the product team from real users.

As a result, the data – that you are using to make product decisions – is relevant, trustworthy, timely, and of the highest quality.

2. Direct collects feedback by providing customers that they can touch and feel (tangible), not something hypothetical

Indirect methods (like focus groups & surveys) rely on asking potential customers to predict what they like / not like to a hypothetical scenario.

Imagine trying to explain Google Search to someone in the early 1990s. It would never work. Customers would simply not have the right context to base their decisions.

Direct practices turn this on its head. Instead of hypothetical scenarios, users are presented with tangible prototypes which they can see, touch, feel, and experience. 

By providing users the right context, product teams can learn in real time what customers like, don’t like, and what needs to change today.  

Making this type of feedback real, tangible, and (most importantly) actionable.  

3. Direct forces product teams to break past their biases and see what the customer sees

With indirect practices we are more likely to see what we want to see.

Which is what happens when we read statistics, demographic data, web trends etc.  We subconsciously biased to pick out data that confirms our initial assumptions.   

Which is why direct approaches include the users in the design process.  This forces the product team to get past their own biases and see the world from the customer’s perspective.

We are forced to see what the customer sees.

No wonder the modern approach delivers better results.  

The choice is yours.

Happy building.